Some embodiments described herein relate generally to providing security for applications and data on mobile, or edge, clients.
Organizations such as, for example, financial institutions have various data protection and security requirements. Some employees and customers of such organizations would like to be able to use their personal mobile devices (e.g., iOS and Android) for business purposes and for accessing services provided by the organizations. In order to provide such capabilities to the users, the organizations need solutions that provide for device, application, and data security and management.
Some currently known solutions for securing mobile devices, such as, for example, Smartphones and tablets, lack comprehensive capabilities for managing applications, services, policies, devices, and data. Some organizations rely on the basic security policies of their mobile operating system (OS) provider. These policies tend to be quite coarse, thus wipe or delete the phone's entire memory or use a certain length password, etc. Similarly, some third party solutions provide a separate walled garden that does not allow arbitrary applications to be run or support fine-grain customization based on corporate policies and user preferences.
For example, some mobile operating system (OS) providers tend to provide limited device security, for example, to password protect a device, encrypt a device, wipe (erase data and reset) a device remotely, etc. If, however, system users can access their emails through a built-in mail client, they may be able to download attachments and save the attachments to unsecured locations. Storage of data in unsecured locations can be particularly problematic for financial and medical information. Similarly, a malicious application installed on the user's personal device can be running on the mobile device and be watching the clipboard, or accessing another application's cached or persistently stored data.
Furthermore, there is a range of existing security solutions on traditional enterprise clients (e.g. desktops and laptops) including the use of a variety of software to verify the computer, virtualize a work environment, and the like. Such solutions are not well suited for mobile devices, which have specialized operating systems and less computing power. Such mobile devices have more recently been targeted as highly personal, as opposed to corporate, devices. For example, some solutions manage and house, bring-your-own-PC solutions that provide a centrally managed virtual computing environment to laptops and desktops. In addition, some companies have defined self-contained application suites to provide a secure environment. This approach, however, does not enable users to access the full range of native applications available for the mobile device in a secure fashion.
Therefore, a need exists for solutions that provide for enterprise type security protection on mobile devices that allow for the devices to remain highly usable as both enterprise and personal mobile devices. Enterprises need systems to provide secure application distribution (including lifecycle management), location and networking environment awareness (e.g., to provide different access permissions inside the corporate network vs. outside), isolation of applications (corporate vs. personal), data encryption and isolation (e.g., application A cannot access application B's data without permission), user profile isolation/personalization, offline application data access and synchronization in an edge operating system agnostic fashion, etc.